On Tuesday 18 Mar 2014 10:28:05 message wrote: > No, the system does not start as root. > > After many reboots, am unable to sign-in directly as normal user 'a'. > Have to sign in as 'root' (command 'su' not recognised), then change to > 'a' using 'su a'. Access to /home directory 'a' (/home/a) is successful. What do you mean by "command 'su' not recognised"? Is this a message displayed when you try to log in as "a"? Clearly 'su' does work, as you say you can use it after logging in as root. >From your root account, can you do "passwd a" and set a new password for the "a" account to see if that helps? If that's no good, can you show us the relevant line in /etc/passwd, so we can check it looks OK? (The password isn't stored in there, as has been explained already.) Paul
